No matter where you look, a bell curve is close by. Place a measuring cup in your backyard every time it rains and note the height of the water when it stops: Your data will conform to a bell curve. Record 100 people’s guesses at the number of jelly beans in a jar, and they’ll follow a bell curve. Measure enough women’s heights, men’s weights, SAT scores, marathon times — you’ll always get the… Source No matter where you look, a bell curve is close by. Place a measuring cup in y...

Yesterday I wrote a shard on exploring the etcd codebase . One of the things that stood out was how the clientv3 package abstracts out the underlying gRPC machinery. etcd is a distributed key-value store where the server and client communicate over gRPC. But if you’ve only ever used clientv3 and never peeked into the internals, you wouldn’t know that. You call resp, err := client.Put(ctx, "key", "value") and get back a *PutResponse . It feels like a regular Go library. The fact tha...

(If you live in Montgomery County Maryland OR if you care about Education, you MUST read this guest blog by Daniel Gottesman on Scott Aaronson's blog  HERE .)  (This post is a sequel to a prior post on this topic that was  here . However, this post is self-contained---you don't need to have read the prior post.)   (Later in the post I point to my open problems column that does what is in this post rigorously. However , that link might be hard to find, so here it is:   HERE ) BILL: I have ...

Port of Salalah in Oman on fire following an Iranian drone attack. Via OSINTdefender on Twitter . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week we look at closure of the Strait of Hormuz, banning build-to-rent homes in the US, Honda’s EV losses, Travis Kalanick’s new company, Corpus Christi’s water crisis, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid ...

I tend to focus on the origin of the computer within the military. Particularly in the early days of digital computing, the military was a key customer, and fundamental concepts of modern computing arose in universities and laboratories serving military contracts. Of course, the war would not last forever, and computing had applications in so many other fields—fields that, nonetheless, started out as beneficiaries of military largesse. Consider education. The Second World War had a profound ...

I wanted to explore the extent to which Claude Code could build a data pipeline using dbt without iterative prompting. What difference did skills, models, and the prompt itself make? I’ve written in a separate post about what I found ( yes it’s good; no it’s not going to replace data engineers, yet ). In this post I’m going to show how I ran these tests (with Claude) and analysed the results (using Claude), including a pretty dashboard (created by Claude): I wanted to ...

TL;DR; No - AI won’t kill open source, but it will reshape it. Small, single-purpose packages (micro open source) are likely to languish as AI agents write trivial utility code on the fly. But major frameworks, databases, and runtimes like Django, Postgres, and Python itself aren’t going anywhere - AI agents actually prefer reaching for established building blocks over reinventing them. The key is staying in the architect’s seat. AI will replace the trivial, leave the foundational, a...

How far can you go with IX Route Servers only? On paper internet exchanges (IX) are very simple in their implementation, simply put together a bunch of routers on a shared layer 2 ethernet switch How far can you go with IX Route Servers only? On paper internet exchanges (IX) are very simple in their implementation, simply put together a bunch of routers on a shared layer 2 ethernet switch How far can you go with IX Route Servers only? On paper internet exchanges (IX) are very simp...

Back in 2024 I went through the process of losing weight, and was fairly successful . I went from ~111kg (244lbs) to ~103kg (226lbs). My target was 100kg (220lbs), so I got very close. But then, in August 2024, I was promoted in work, ended up working way more hours, and my health suffered. I ended up burned out and ultimately I stepped down a few months ago. Which was honestly the right thing to do . Anyway, for the year or so that I was in that role, my weight slowly crept back up ...

I built a tiny shell in C to learn what fork, execvp, and dup2 are doing under the hood. I built a tiny shell in C to learn what fork, execvp, and dup2 are doing under the hood.

I was a speaker last month at the Pragmatic Summit in San Francisco, where I participated in a fireside chat session about Agentic Engineering hosted by Eric Lui from Statsig. The video is available on YouTube . Here are my highlights from the conversation. Stages of AI adoption We started by talking about the different phases a software developer goes through in adopting AI coding tools. 02:45 I feel like there are different stages of AI adoption as a programmer. You star...

Understanding the social media zeitgeist around CLIs and the premature death of MCP Understanding the social media zeitgeist around CLIs and the premature death of MCP

The eight-hour work week, its limitations and the importance of living outside the office. The eight-hour work week, its limitations and the importance of living outside the office.

Recently I came into posession of a few Apple Xserves. The one in question today is an Xserve G5, RackMac3,1 , which was built when Apple at the top—and bottom—of it's PowerPC era. This isn't the first Xserve—that honor belongs to the G4 1 . And it wasn't the last—there were a few generations of Intel Xeon-powered RackMacs that followed. But in my opinion, it was the most interesting. Unfortunately, being manufactured in 2004, this Mac's Delta power supply suffers from the Cap...

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Patrick Rhone, whose blog can be found at patrickrhone.net . Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter . People and Blogs is supported by the "One a Month" club members. If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little as 1 dollar a month. Let's start from the basics: can you introduce yourself? My name is Patrick Rhone. When I'm not tryi...

How isogenies can solve Bitcoin's Quantum problems How isogenies can solve Bitcoin's Quantum problems

The top of the Artemis II SLS rocket at its launchpad at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, with our Moon providing the ultimate backdrop. Bottom left: Artemis II mission crew patch. Images: NASA / Sam Lott / Greg Manchess On February 25, NASA  rolled back  the  SLS rocket  and its attached Orion spacecraft from the vehicle’s launchpad at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida to its assembly building about seven kilometers away. Technicians then replaced a dislodged s...

I love Monobook . It was the skin Wikipedia when I started contributing back in 2004, and it’s still the skin I have enabled in my Wikimedia account. It’s also the one Clara and I use on the Sasara Wiki , our family wiki. The volunteer maintainers have done an amazing job keeping it current, but I also add a few more tweaks to MediaWiki:Monobook.css . This sets the base font a bit larger; the absolute size is defined elsewhere, so this gets pretty close to 1em for the main body text. ...

All my clients wanted a carousel, now it's an AI chatbot! 2026-03-14 12:55 It always starts the same way. The client pulls out their phone mid-meeting, navigates to a competitor's website, and holds the screen up like evidence. "You see? They have one of those." A little bubble. Bottom right corner. Blinking... For years, that gesture was about carousels. Every homepage had to have one, big, slow, full of stock photos that nobody asked for. I built dozens of them. They spun. They faded. ...

I started work on Distributed Systems Design by Example exactly 212 days ago. The first draft is now done, and I’ve learned a lot while writing it, just as I learned a lot by writing books on software design in JavaScript and Python . However, I don’t know if I will ever finish this book: people don’t seem to read long-form technical writing any longer, and there several pieces of fiction that I want to get over the finish line. Still, I hope what’s there is useful. I started work ...

It’s a common position among software engineers that big egos have no place in tech 1 . This is understandable - we’ve all worked with some insufferably overconfident engineers who needed their egos checked - but I don’t think it’s correct. In fact, I don’t know if it’s possible to survive as a software engineer in a large tech company without some kind of big ego. However, it’s more complicated than “big egos make good engineers”. The most effective engineers I’ve worked...

“I know we are going to take a very long road, into darkness; but I know I can't turn back.” ― The Lord of the Rings Black Abyss Waitomo is mostly known for their glowworm caves. Most people book a short boat ride to view the countless New Zealand glowworms ( Arachnocampa luminosa ). I probably wouldn't include this activity in my trip if there wasn't a much more adventurous alternative: the Black Abyss , a caving tour. After putting on a wetsuit, you start with a 35 m a...

In late January, I published a post 1 ( archive ) on the Databricks engineering blog about “SAFE”, the feature flagging and experimentation platform I’ve been working on for the past few years. SAFE is what I’ve been spending most of my time on during my time at Databricks, and it’s been rewarding to see the project grow from an initial prototype to a mature internal platform. I’ve been the tech lead for SAFE for a while now, and the project has scaled significantly in headcount,...